The Intellectual Elite Read NYT

Wow.

The way I read this, TCO is so smart, many of us are just not smart enough to "get" his message? It can't possibly be the message, right? And the comments are almost exclusively, "Why of course, he's too smart. People are stupid and just don't understand that he wants to 'lift a burden from their shoulders'. If they were only as smart as we Smart People are, why everything would be Right as Rain."

I suspect I'm as smart as any of the commenters, probably as smart as the author and maybe even as smart as TCO himself. And I'm hardly smarter than most people I know.

No, the problem isn't that we are too stupid to understand TCO's message of Hope and Change. We just don't like what he's selling.

I was going to stop there, but one of the comments struck me:

If Obama truly cared about being a straight-shooting reformer, he would have supported single-payer health care coverage, which is structurally very simple, and he could have explained it clearly and effectively, though Republicans would have opposed whatever he proposed. Still, Obama might have won over many independents to a single payer position if he had made a real effort at showing how simple single payer is and how it works in countries all over the world.

No, he does want single-payer. But he knows it's a non-starter in this country. His plan is a stealth approach. By requiring insurance companies to insure everyone and take pre-existing conditions, and who-knows-what-else, he knows he will put them out of business. That will then require a government takeover. BTW, single-payer does not work. Ask those in Canada and the UK. I understand (anecdotally from a friend with family there) that Germany is moving away from single-payer.

Finally many in the liberal Dem base in MA went so far as to vote for the Republican Brown in order to give Obama some shock treatment and send him a wakeup call.

Really? They voted against the candidate who said all the right stuff to vote for someone who is anathema to them? I seriously doubt it. And explain why independents broke for Brown? Same reason? Or were they just too stupid to understand the message?

I am so tired of being labeled as "too stupid to understand the message" by the "Smart People".

Torches and pitchforks, my friends, torches and pitchforks.